The Furies by Mark Alpert Page B

Bridge. Sullivan and his Riflemen would cover the other routes to Haven.
    He gunned the Harley’s engine as the highway sloped upward. The night was cold for early September, and the frigid wind slapped his face. But at least it blew away the stink of the junkie. After interrogating Rodriguez, Sullivan had slit the wretch’s throat, and some of the blood had splashed on his jeans. Although Rodriguez told him plenty about John Rogers and the young redhead who’d been shot in the legs, the junkie didn’t know which way they’d fled. Sullivan dispatched his men to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the other interstate highways, and though they spotted many old, dented Kias, none of them was the car they were looking for. They had no choice but to regroup in Michigan and wait for their targets to approach Haven.
    Still, the visit to Philadelphia hadn’t been a total waste. Before leaving Rodriguez’s house, Sullivan had placed the bloody knife on the floor next to the junkie’s corpse. He’d acquired this knife from one of the gang members he’d hired to ransack Rogers’s apartment. Its handle was greasy and covered with Rogers’s fingerprints, and Sullivan had been careful to use gloves while holding it. Afterwards, he called 911 and gave the Philadelphia police an anonymous tip. John Rogers, he told them, had just killed Gabriel Rodriguez, a North Philly junkie, because of a drug deal gone bad. And now Rogers, he added, was heading for Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a 2006 Kia.
    Sullivan got a call from Agent Larson two hours later. As expected, the Philadelphia cops had gone to the junkie’s house and found the corpse and bloody knife. Then they’d gone to Rogers’s apartment and discovered the fifteen pounds of methamphetamine that Sullivan had planted there. And then, after learning that Rogers was wanted by the FBI in connection with the shootings in New York, the cops had called Larson and told him what they’d found. Larson, in turn, contacted Sullivan to find out why Rogers would go to the Upper Peninsula. Sullivan acted cagey at first, pretending not to know anything. Then he said he’d heard a rumor that everyone in Rogers’s gang was making a run for the Canadian border. His words had their intended effect: after another two hours, Sullivan’s men in the U.P. reported that the state police had set up a checkpoint on the Mackinac Bridge.
    Now, after riding his Harley halfway across the Midwest, Sullivan was less than two hundred miles from his destination. He glanced at Marlowe, who rode in the adjacent lane just a couple of yards to his right. Each man wore a backpack that held an M4 carbine and two hundred rounds of ammunition. Marlowe’s face was a mess, so bloodied and bruised from the beating John Rogers had given him that his spiderweb tattoo was barely visible. But he rode his Harley as steadily as ever, his eyes full of hatred. Sullivan had promised him a chance to get his revenge on Rogers if they captured the man alive.
    In addition to his M4, Sullivan carried a Mauser HSc, a vintage German pistol. Ever since he’d started the rebellion against the Council of Elders, he’d been collecting Nazi-era weapons and regalia. At first he did it as part of his effort to disguise his men, to make the Riflemen look like the other motorcycle gangs that roamed across the country. Over the past year, though, he’d come to identify with Hitler’s Third Reich. Although the Nazis had committed some terrible crimes, at least you couldn’t accuse them of underreaching. Their goal was to change the very nature of humanity. And this was Sullivan’s goal as well. He was going to create a new race of men.
    He kept his Mauser in a shoulder holster under his jacket. As he raced down the dark highway, the Harley roaring in his ears, he felt the pistol’s handle against his ribs. In just a few hours this gun would make history. He